this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Man these bankers can't even keep up. Bitcoin has been doing this for 15 years across all borders and the recent lightning upgrade makes it even better. It's accessible to anybody with a cell phone in every country regardless of their credit history, the stability of their banking system, or the reliability of their national currency. And no government or politician can increase the supply thereby decreasing the portion of it you own. It does this 24/7 365 with zero downtime, no bank holidays, and for .1% of global electricity usage. Less than remittance services alone like Western Union use and mostly from renewables. It is the first truly international currency.
You can send a million dollars for less than 50c in fees on the main chain or <1c in fees on lightning. Lightning transactions confirm in microseconds, main chain transactions confirm in seconds to minutes depending on block timing and how much security you want to guarantee.
Main chain transactions should, on average, take around 6 minutes to confirm.
It'll be seconds only if you're very lucky.
Don't wanna hate, crypto is hella cool, but overselling it won't help anyone.
Edit: oh yeah, and lightning won't confirm in microseconds, you've got your scales mixed up mate, it's gonna be tens to hundreds of milliseconds, simply of your wifi's latency.
For everyday spending, I would consider "The tx is valid, signed, seen by nodes, and has a fee high enough to make it into the next couple blocks" as plenty of confirmation on main chain. That part takes seconds. Like if I'm splitting a bill w a friend a merchant selling somebody a coffee a double-spend attack is really not even in my realm of considerations, I don't need it to make it into a block.
Nobody serious is ever gonna sell you anything without a block confirmation, that's just delusional.
For a settlement with a friend, sure, but don't tell me you believe you'll walk out of a store before it hits at least 1 conf
It's not a double spend if it hasn't been confirmed yet, you can always replace-by-fee before it even makes it onchain
A. Lightning solves this with their super fast confirmation times.
B. Merchants do this regularly. The equivalent to a full block confirmation (the money is yours now and the transaction can't be reversed) for credit cards is on the order of 30 days. Venmo and paypal have similar policies. Plus higher fees. Plus sometimes they charge or otherwise punish you even in the unlikely event you win the dispute.
The risk of fraud is the cost of doing business and buyer-initiated fraud is rampant on these platforms. It's why I don't sell anything > $50 USD on ebay, because the buyer can just say it "doesn't work" and get to keep the item and get their money back.
A. I'm not saying it doesn't, I'm just disputing what you said about onchain txs.
B. CCs are much less anonymous, making engaging in fraud much riskier. If you did this 10 times your bank would notice, adds up for you. If you do it with an anonymous system, you're forgotten the second you walk out of the store (barring being caught on camera but you can solve that by wearing a mask or something).
I do see your point, but I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison.